


Come Undone

by track_04



Category: Firefall Series - Peter Watts
Genre: Anal Fingering, Body Horror, Bruises, Dream Sex, Hallucinations, M/M, Masturbation, Pre-Canon, Sex Pollen, Somnophilia, Tentacles, Vampire Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 20:42:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18454274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/pseuds/track_04
Summary: Sixty-three days after Siri Keeton climbed into his coffin aboard Theseus, he climbed out again.The Theseus crew wakes up earlier than expected. Things don't go according to plan. At least not for Siri.





	Come Undone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amber](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber/gifts).



> Your prompts and letter were amazing! I hope I was able to do them justice, and that you have as much fun reading this as I had writing it for you! (And considerably more fun than Siri.)

Sixty-three days after Siri Keeton climbed into his coffin aboard Theseus, he climbed out again.

The air in the crypt was not-quite warm and smelled like nothing, any hint of staleness or personality long since filtered out of it; he pulled himself into it on stick-like limbs, watching as his teammates did the same, studying their reactions to themselves and each other.

He kept half his attention on them and used the other half to check the logs, trying to bring himself up to speed and ignore the ache that was his body. He was taking in the wary tilt of Susan James's eyebrows and running through the telemetry reports when he realized just how long they'd been asleep. Or hadn't.

He paused, running the report back for review. Once, twice, checking for a mistake that he knew wouldn't be there.

Across the room, Szpindel whistled. "I'm not the only one getting this, right?"

"No, not just you." James frowned, pulling herself out of her coffin on arms that looked like kindling. She stood there, one hand clutching the side of her coffin as she stared into nothing. "Does anyone have any idea _why_ the Captain woke us up nearly three months ahead of schedule?"

Silence followed for long enough that Siri would have considered answering her, but he didn't have any answer to give. They were all operating on the same information.

"We're also wildly off course." Szpindel's voice broke in finally, sounding darkly amused. "Boy am I glad they spent so long reassuring us about how state-of-the-art Theseus is or I might be worried that we're screwed."

 _Us and the rest of humanity,_ Siri thought. He could see the other's echoing the thought with the flick of their wrist, the rigid set of their shoulders, the way they gingerly prodded at one of the bags of liquid feeding into their dried husk of a body.

"I'm sure we'll find out everything soon enough," Bates said from where she stood in the corner, papery skin visible above the collar of her uniform. She watched the rest of them fumble around, still naked and even more helpless than she was, the corners of her mouth twitching with impatience. 

"Yeah." There was a slight tilt to the corner of Szpindel's left eye that screamed suspicion. "I'm sure we will."

Siri glanced at the empty fifth coffin, knowing without looking that the others were all doing the same.

\--

Sarasti sat across Theseus's only conference table from Siri, eyes unreadable behind his glasses; beyond him, the walls of the drum shifted, a steady spin designed to build the gravity up around them slowly enough that their still fragile bodies wouldn't snap under the pressure.

If Theseus had been a person, Siri might have said there was something weary about that movement, read uncertainty along its surfaces. Something about the hum of the ship around them felt wrong, full of denial, like a parent not mentioning the thunderstorm raging outside their window and hoping their child would follow their cue.

Siri's teammates were scattered around the table around him, silent as they finished taking in the information Sarasti was feeding them through ConSensus. 

"So, why are we awake, exactly?" Szpindel was always the first to speak. His fingers tapped against the tabletop, gloves thudding heavily against the wood. "Not that I'm not overjoyed to see all your smiling faces, but it sounds like it will be a long time before we get to wherever it is that we're going."

"If ever," James said, the sharpness in her voice a counterpoint to the dull drumming of Szpindel's fingertips. Siri turned to look at her and saw the anger beneath her features that made her face Sascha's instead. "This sounds like a wild fucking goose chase, if you ask me."

Sarasti's non-reaction was a reaction in itself. "Theseus takes us off course for a reason. She knows where we're going."

"Then why doesn't she just tell us where that is? Or _you_ , since we all know you fucking know and just aren't--"

"And why do we need to be awake for this?" Bates spoke up, cutting through the middle of Sascha's tirade. From the corner of his eye, Siri could see Sascha scatter, in anger or frustration or because she was simply forced to take a backseat; James rose to the surface again and settled into place. "Unless we're under threat, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to it."

"Theseus burns through most of her fuel when she changes course. She also sustains damage to her systems," Sarasti said, voice calm even as the muscles in his neck twitched, tense with a predator's readiness. "Nothing serious enough to jeopardize the mission, but she cannot run all nine coffins and the necessary repairs at the same time. So, she chooses to wake us up."

"And our backups?" The rest of the crew glanced around the table, noting the absence of people they already knew weren't there.

Sarasti pressed his hands against the tabletop, fingers spindly and white against the dark wood. "They stay asleep, in case something goes wrong here."

Szpindel shifted, shoulder joints cracking audibly. "And we're here in case something goes wrong there, I take it."

The smile Sarasti gave them was not reassuring. "That is the reasoning, yes."

"So we're awake until repairs are complete?" James shared a look with Szpindel. "Being awake this soon and going back under won't hurt us?"

"Nah, we've got the DNA and the equipment to handle it. We may not have much to do, what with the aliens being years away. But, hey, might be nice to get out and stretch our legs a bit."

Bates kept her gaze fixed on Sarasti. "Is there anything Theseus needs from us?" 

"Just that you are awake and alive."

"Pretty sure we can handle that. If not, we're in trouble." Szpindel smiled.

Siri saw Bates and James nod along and didn't bother echoing them, too busy cataloguing the slight shift of Sarasti's fingertips against the table.

\--

The galley felt too-small after the wide open space of the drum and too-large after the half-remembered confines of his coffin. Siri found it both comforting and distracting as he took a seat at the table across from Bates, a freshly squeezed mug of coffee in one hand and a protein bar in the other. The bar was tasteless and dry, like dust on his tongue, but more than enough to meet his current needs. He choked it down and reached for his mug to wash the dryness from his mouth, hand shaking slightly with the effort it took to lift it.

He took a sip and paused, mug trembling in mid-air, face thoughtful.

He'd never been particularly fond of coffee; he drank it because it was hot and the taste wasn't objectionable and, sometimes, the remaining half of his brain still craved caffeine. He hadn't inherited or learned Helen's passion for it, commenting on the merits of bulbed coffee versus freshly brewed or turning up his nose at anything he deemed subpar. That had always seemed, to him, like another of her unknowable habits--one of those things that he could watch, process, file away and use to read her moods. But it wasn't something he really _understood_ on more than a theoretical level.

Seated on one of the uncomfortable galley chairs, taking his second sip of still not-quite-too-hot coffee from his mug, it felt almost like he did. The taste sent a faint spark of something the still-living half of his brain registered as pleasure. Nostalgia. _Happiness_. It was oddly warm, like the mental equivalent of sinking into a warm bath, and left a faint tingling along the empty side of his skull. He could feel his augments tripping over themselves as they tried to process something that he'd thought was only a remnant of his past self. An emotional muscle memory.

He stared down at the dark liquid surface, blinking slowly, and wondered if this was a side effect of space travel. Or maybe an undocumented (and why would it be, for something so insignificant?) side effect of the additions to his DNA or the months he'd spent in hibernation.

He wondered if vampires had a fondness for coffee. If Sarasti would answer him if he asked.

He filed the thought away for later, making a mental note to observe his teammates'--both human and not--coffee consumption, and turned his attention back to the angry slant of Bates's shoulders.

\--

Sleeping in Theseus was like being embraced by a facsimile of a person, someone who looked vaguely familiar and held you with arms that were longer than they should have been, the flesh covering them just a bit too cold. Siri preferred it to the forced nothingness of his coffin, realized as soon as he closed his eyes on that first night that he liked the slight discomfort of it.

His dreams, when they came, were constantly shifting things, a war between the organic half of his brain and its synthetic twin. The still-human half struggled to process his thoughts and memories from the day, organizing them with messy processes formed through millennia of evolution. The machine parts of him re-organized themselves in more logical order, a man-made approximation of the things his body already knew how to do.

He dreamed in colors and numbers, floating bodiless through a sea of unrelated images and lines of code. Memories bumped up against him--the last look he'd received from his mother when she'd still had eyes to pretend to see him with; the approving nod his father had given him when they'd said their goodbyes, nearly a month before Theseus had launched them out of Earth's orbit; Szpindel handing him a beer and telling him to lighten up already, it was their last night on Earth; Pag and Chelsea seated across from him at a table, laughing about something that he couldn't remember.

Sarasti standing in front of him the first time they were introduced, eyes cold and red and inhuman behind his glasses, assessing Siri with a level of clarity and interest he wasn't used to.

Siri pushed that one away, tugging at a memory of himself standing in his bathroom on Earth and wrapping it around himself like a shield. He stared at his remembered reflection in a fogged bathroom mirror, one hand pushing his hair aside to reveal an angry scar along his scalp, and waited, as he always did, to feel something.

There was a flutter of something behind his sternum, brief and uncertain. It was less pleasant than that first sip of coffee, but still enough of a _feeling_ to remind him of it anyway. He moved his hand to his chest and waited to feel it again. There was nothing but silence and stillness beneath his fingertips.

The memory faded, leaving him drifting through an empty, colorless space. Code sparked along the edges of his vision and he let it, content to exist in that non-space. He dropped his hand from his chest and settled into the blankness of sleep.

The presence caught him off guard when it came, sliding into his protective bubble of relaxed, aimless drifting so carefully that the edges barely even shimmered. It was nothing but a whisper, a faint glimmer of red against the dark and the weight of a familiar gaze on the back of his neck.

It made him shift restlessly both inside the dream and out, arms and legs reaching out briefly, searching for something, before they pulled in tight again. In his dreams, he turned in a slow circle, tracking that hint of red through the emptiness around him, like chasing a fleeting memory or a particularly interesting line of code.

There was a voice in his ear, curious and even as it whispered his name, loud enough to fill his head and the void surrounding him. He could feel both parts of his brain reacting to this new intruder, instinct and programmed reaction fighting for dominance.

Fingers brushed the back of his neck, cold and inhuman.

"Be still," the voice whispered, fingers drifting upwards into his hair, touching the end of one of his scars before disappearing again.

Siri spun around, searching for the source, and found nothing, the dream wide and empty and cold around him.

 _Hello?_ He thought into the void. There was no answer. Not even the echo of his thought thrown back at him.

He reached for that sense of blank safety again, but before he could grasp the edges of it, he felt a brush of the memory of that whisper against his fingertips. He jerked his hand away from it and his mind lurched, yanking him away from it, pulling him out of that dream space and back into consciousness.

When he opened his eyes to stare into the twilight glow of his tent he was still alone, forehead slick with sweat and a heaviness between his legs that he chose to ignore.

\--

"Hey, commissar." Szpindel was balanced on one of the stools in his lab, a spindly bit of metal and plastic that looked like it should have crumpled beneath his weight. He waited for Siri to join him and motioned to the empty seat beside him.

Siri chose to stand, noting the thoughtful angle of Szpindel's left wrist. "Did you need something?"

"Not really. Just noticed you lurking in the halls and thought you might be more entertaining than reviewing footage of the fireflies that I've already seen a hundred times." He gave Siri a once-over, expression thoughtful. "Looks like you plumped up nicely."

Siri looked back at him. "You, too."

"If you were anyone else, I might think you were flirting." Szpindel arched an eyebrow and continued before Siri could point out that anyone else would have had that impulse drugged out of them. "Any issues with your recovery? Strange reactions?"

Siri thought about his dream and the taste of the coffee he'd had that morning and the faint hum of something buried deep in his chest. He shook his head. "No. Should I? I thought there weren't supposed to be any side effects outside of the first few hours."

"There shouldn't be." Siri could see Szpindel's thoughts flit away from their conversation, briefly, and knew he was remembering something Michelle had said earlier in the day. It hadn't quite made him laugh. "Although part of me has kind of been wishing there were. Might give me something to do. Space travel is surprisingly boring."

"Isn't that better than the alternative?"

Szpindel's grin was slightly off-center. "Yeah. Do me a favor and remind me of this conversation when we get to wherever we're going and have aliens breathing down our necks, okay?"

"Assuming they're actually hostile, I will," Siri said. He remembered something he'd watched as a child, an old vid about aliens who'd sucked out everything that made someone human and filled the hole they left with themselves. For a moment, he reconsidered mentioning the strangeness that he could still feel inside of him.

Szpindel laughed and the impulse shook loose, settled into nothing. Siri stood there, watching Szpindel and wondering if he'd ever have reason to remind him of this conversation. 

He was surprised to realize that he hoped he wouldn't.

\--

Siri was seated alone in the middle of the drum, Theseus's walls folded back, her viewing windows open and the emptiness of space visible all around him. His teammates were elsewhere in the ship, reading and running through routines they didn't need yet and waiting to be observed. He tilted his head back and stared up into the blankness of space. 

His mouth tasted of coffee, thick and bitter. He moved his tongue against the roof of his mouth and felt a spark of joy low in his stomach.

He felt Sarasti before he saw him, movements slick and predatory. There was a brief, uncharacteristic shuffle to his step as soon as Siri started to listen, a quiet scuff of boot against deck plating. A warning.

Siri's spine straightened, toes curling against the soles of his boots as he kept his gaze fixed on the stars. He felt a prickle in the back of his neck and fought the instinct to turn his head to look. "Are the repairs almost finished?"

There was the pointed silence of something not moving. "No."

 _Then why are you here?_ he didn't ask. He could feel Sarasti picking the unspoken question out of the empty air, turning it over before tossing it away, unanswered.

The dropped his head finally, turned through the silence to look at Sarasti. The room behind him was empty, but he caught a glimpse of dark material against pale skin, a spidery movement along the edge of his vision. He blinked, and it was gone again.

\--

His dreams that night were sticky things, thick and clinging, their usual emptiness forgotten. He floated through them, a strange thrumming in his chest and an ache in his skull as both halves of his brain struggled to make sense of everything happening around them.

In the corner of his eye, there was a glimmer of red, a pair of eyes shining against the dark. He spun in an endless circle, trying to track them, never quite managing more than a glimpse before they drifted away again.

He remembered white hands and black stars. Fingers sharp against the side of his neck. A welcome bitterness on his tongue.

There was no one else in the tent when he jerked back into wakefulness, a familiar dryness in his mouth and a telltale heat low in his gut.

\--

Siri, as he existed now, had always slept less than a normal person.

It was an after effect of the surgery, one of the things that had frustrated his mother in those early days when she was still coming to terms with the death of her son and his rebirth into something new. Something less ideal.

At first, Siri had always climbed out of bed after those few hours of necessary sleep. He roamed their house, reading books and watching vids and staring at images of his mother and father and a boy that wasn't himself, doing what he needed to do to himself occupied. Sometimes he sat alone in the quiet, trying to re-familiarize himself with the shape of his own thoughts. Helen had looked horrified each time she found him, sitting alone and staring out into nothing. She fussed and fretted and took him to doctors, refusing to accept their reassurances that nothing was wrong. That this was just the way things were now.

It took six months before Siri finally learned to just stay in bed until he heard her footsteps in the hallway, letting her have the illusion that he might still be asleep.

It was something that he hadn't bothered with since he'd left his parents' house, but standing alone in the middle of the galley with Theseus shifting quietly beneath him, he almost wished he'd stayed in his tent, waiting to hear the sound of Bates's boots against the deck plating. Something about the low lighting in the galley, the way it opened out into the ship, Theseus's spine hung high above him, left him feeling exposed.

He pushed the thought away, filed it away for later and sat down. He squeezed the bulb of coffee in his hand, feeling that faint spark of something as the bubble of packaging around it popped and liquid poured into the mug below. He leaned forward, breathing in the scent of it, that now-familiar thrumming behind his breast bone picking up speed.

It stuttered, changing rhythm as he sensed something in the space behind him, just over his left shoulder, and turned to find Sarasti standing in the doorway, watching him with slightly narrowed eyes.

"Good morning, Siri."

"Good morning." Siri blamed the unevenness of his voice on the early hour.

A ripple of tension went through Sarasti's limbs but he didn't move, held himself unnaturally still, his gaze moving from Siri's face to the cup in his hand. "It's early."

"I don't need much sleep."

Sarasti nodded, accepting the obviousness of the statement. "Theseus will adjust the lighting and climate controls to better suit your hours. If there's anything else you need, be sure to ask."

"I will," Siri said, unsure whether or not he was lying.

Sarasti stared at him a moment longer, face unmoving, and then turned and walked back into the ship.

Siri kept his gaze on the now empty doorway, sipping his coffee. He wondered if vampires preferred to hunt their prey in the dark, or if it was easier to attack them in the light, after they'd found somewhere they felt safe.

\--

Sascha sat on the floor between her tent and Szpindel's, finishing a cup of coffee with an expression of faint disgust. Siri could tell by the way she blinked that she wanted to be alone, too tired of dealing with the others in her head to have the energy to deal with anyone else outside of it.

Siri hadn't intended to approach her, but he hadn't intended not to, either, so he moved closer and gave her his best approximation of a friendly look. "Hello."

"Come to interrogate us, have you?" Her grip on the mug's handle tightened, forehead creasing with suspicion. 

"Just doing my job."

"I bet you are." Sascha snorted. "So what, you want to chit chat? Didn't think you were capable."

"Maybe not the way you're thinking," Siri said, letting his expression shift back into something more neutral.

"Come back when James or Michelle are in charge. They might care enough to try." 

Siri watched as she lifted the mug to her mouth and took a drink, like a child being forced by a parent to finish the last few bites of cold spinach left on their plate. "You don't like the coffee?"

She gave him a look that made her opinion of both him and his question abundantly clear. Her index finger twitched against the handle of the coffee mug, wishing it were holding something heavier, slightly more dangerous instead. "No. Does anyone?"

"I don't know." Surprise flitted across Siri's face, quick and fleeting, before he managed to smooth it over. 

Sascha had already focused her attention back on her coffee and didn't seem to notice. "Maybe you should go ask them and find out, then."

"I probably should."

"Good," she said, and stared at him like something she'd scraped off the bottom of her boot. "Now, go away and let me finish my shitty coffee in peace."

Siri left without further comment, his legs carrying him back to the galley before he'd really had time to consider where he was going. 

The coffee tasted better than he remembered.

\--

He knew the voice would be there even before he closed his eyes. His brain didn't bother with memories this time, dropped him straight into that jumbled darkness with fingers buried in his hair and hot breath against his ear.

The red on the edge of his vision glowed bright, twin points of heat above a too-wide smile.

The air smelled like burnt coffee. Or fresh blood.

Sarasti existed in the corner of his vision, a spindly, bleached figure; Siri didn't try to look at him. 

"I wasn't looking for you," Siri said, voice loud against the dark.

"No," Sarasti agreed. "But you will."

Siri refused to look at that smile, afraid it might cut him. "I won't."

"Are you sure?" Breath ghosted against the side of his neck and a hand gripped his jaw, turning his head to the side to better bare his throat. Siri felt the press of teeth against his skin, long fingers digging into the sides of his face hard enough to bruise.

Sarasti hissed, low and threatening, and Siri closed his eyes.

He woke with a start, the front of his pants damp and sticky. The only sound in the room was his panicked panicked breathing as he lifted a hand to touch the side of his neck.

\--

Sarasti spent most of his time in his tent and on the bridge, communing with the Captain.

Siri knew this because he always seemed to be passing by one or the other just as Sarasti was leaving; he couldn't decide if it was purposeful on Sarasti's part or a coincidence. An understandable result given the amount of time he spent wandering the ship, studying his teammates from afar and collecting observations that he hoped would prove useful.

Sarasti didn't look surprised to see Siri when he emerged from the bridge. "You are waiting for me?"

Siri shook his head, eyes a bit too wide. Almost startled. "No."

Sarasti made a click in the back of his throat and Siri felt that persistent ball of pressure in his chest crack open, spill up his side and down into his arm, making his fingers twitch. Sarasti stood where he was, limbs purposefully still, watching him. "Everywhere I go, there you are. Do you need something from me?"

 _It's a small ship,_ Siri started to say, then realized how ridiculous that sounded. Then, _It's a coincidence_ and _Maybe you're the one following me_ , but neither of those felt safe to utter outside the confines of his own head. 

He stared at Sarasti, fingers twitching in time with his pulse, and repeated, "No."

"You'll find me if you do," Sarasti said, giving him a moment before he moved around him, limbs held close to his body. Like he was trying not to spook him.

Siri ignored the tremor that ran back up his arm as Sarasti brushed past, not quite close enough to touch.

\--

Siri floated in the center his tent, eyes open and focused on nothing in particular. The need for sleep tugged at him, but each time his eyelids started to drift shut, he felt the brush of phantom fingers through his hair and they flew open again.

His hand drifted up to his neck, fingers pressing against the place where Sarasti had bitten him. Or where he'd dreamed he had. Would do to him again, out here in the real world, if given the chance. The thought made him shiver, fear and excitement winding their way through him, the tangle that they left behind settling low in his gut.

The tremor was still there in his hand, running up his arm and into his shoulder; his fingers spasmed with it, grasping at the empty air in front of him, and he pulled his arm in, tucked it against his stomach. His hand turned--on its own or because he wanted it to, he couldn't remember--and his fingers slid beneath his shirt to press against his bare skin.

He hissed at the contact, the tremor spreading out from the tips of his fingers, vibrating through his abdomen, twisting him around himself until he felt unrecognizable. He lifted his head, casting a guilty look around him, half-expecting to find Sarasti drifting through the air in front of him. But all he saw was his tent, dimly lit and scattered with his meager possessions, empty and devoid of personality.

_Just like you, Siri._

The thought was oddly soothing. Familiar. Grounding.

The Sarasti in his imagination smirked, judgmental and predatory, drifting a little bit closer. _Are you sure about that?_

 _Yes._ Siri shifted, rotating through the air until he had his back to the place Sarasti wasn't. He could feel that gaze on his trembling shoulder, his bare neck, his fingers pressed hard against his stomach, nails leaving faint red lines against his skin and he pushed his hand lower.

Behind him, the air shifted, spindly white fingers that didn't exist reaching out to touch the place where his shoulder shook, brush against the side of his neck.

Siri uncurled himself slowly, stretching out, leaving himself open to the things that he knew weren't really happening. The air was cool against his cock as he pushed his pants out of the way and took himself in hand, eyes wide open and fixed on the far wall.

He stroked himself inexpertly, out of practice with the real world and struggling to catch up to it, find the right rhythm. Sex had always been easier when it was virtual; he'd never been good with anything that involved interacting with his own body.

The sound of skin on skin and his quick inhales seemed too loud in the silence of the tent, and he wondered how good vampire hearing was, if Sarasti could hear him from his tent, from the bridge, from wherever else he might be right now. He didn't know what he wanted the answer to be.

 _You can ask,_ the Sarasti who wasn't there said, close enough that his breath could have ruffled Siri's hair.

"No," Siri whispered. He imagined long fingers covering his own, guiding him, showing him how it was meant to be done. His hand moved faster, the friction making his cock ache in a way that wasn't entirely pleasant.

 _Be still._ Sarasti's hand tightened its grip and his followed suit, squeezing just hard enough to hurt. He gave another click, hungry and approving, and Siri arched his neck, waiting for a press of teeth that never came.

He closed his eyes as he came, an imagined ache in his neck, bone-deep and bloody.

\--

"You look awful," Szpindel said, taking a seat next to Siri. He had coffee in one hand and a mug in the other, his glove-covered fingertips dipping dangerously into the thin plastic of the bulb surrounding it.

Siri watched, his own coffee long since gone cold, and wondered how long he'd had his augments before he'd learned how much pressure he could exert without bursting that bubble. He wondered if his hands ever felt like they weren't his own. "Is that your medical opinion?"

"It's my opinion as someone with eyes." Szpindel held it over his mug and squeezed just hard enough to crack it open. "You should come by for a checkup."

"I'm functional. Fine, I mean."

"Well, as the person in charge of the health of everyone aboard this ship, I think we should probably aim for better than 'functional'." Szpindel gave a soft laugh and lifted his mug to his lips. "I don't think even Sarasti would settle for that."

Siri took another sip of his coffee and ignored the way his fingers shook. He could see, suddenly, Sarasti floating above him in the dark, the flash of his teeth the only thing making him more than just another shadow; he could hear him saying, with a faint note of disappointment, that he _expects all members of this crew to be better than merely functional_.

"Siri?"

The look Siri gave Szpindel was the blankest one he could manage. He focused on the lingering taste of coffee on his tongue, in his throat, and ignored the growing pressure in his chest. "I haven't been sleeping well."

"Any particular reason for that?"

"No. None that I know of." Siri was glad, not for the first time, that others had always found him so hard to read. Szpindel was unlikely to notice the way his fingers twitched against the side of his mug, or see the sideways tilt to his chin and the slight downturn of one of his eyebrows that marked the words as a lie. Out of all of them, he thought Sarasti was the only one who might have noticed.

"After effects of being turned from a raisin into a person again, maybe. Or stress. Not that any of us would have anything to be stressed about, right?" Szpindel's voice was amused, even as his shoulders rose and fell, the muscles in his arms tightening slightly beneath the thin material of his shirt. Beneath the table, his foot tapped briefly against the floor. "Come by later and I'll give you something that should help."

Siri focused his attention on Szpindel's tells-- cataloguing each twitch and shift and filing them away for later--and let them push the sound of Sarasti's voice out of his head. "I will. Thanks."

Szpindel's wrists turned towards him in suspicion. Siri watched him, face still blank, waiting until the moment passed and Szpindel's surfaces smoothed out again, his usual calm amusement spreading over them like ripples across the surface of a pond. "You should probably lay off the coffee for the rest of the day, too."

Siri nodded and pushed his already empty mug away from him.

\--

Siri saw Sarasti again in one of Theseus's side corridors, a hidden spot tucked up against her far side, away from her spine and the more well-traveled areas surrounding it. His couldn't remember how he'd gotten there or why, the lack of sleep muddying his thoughts, making it hard to focus on anything outside of the bitter taste in his mouth and the shaking in his arm.

One moment he was alone, mulling over his conversation with Szpindel and trying to ignore the growing heat and pressure and want inside of him. The next, he felt the weight of a familiar gaze and looked up to find Sarasti standing a few meters away, body tensed and still as he watched him, like a predator waiting to pounce.

Siri curled his hand into a fist and fought the urge to move closer.

"You look--" Sarasti started, then paused, nostrils flaring and a mixture of surprise and pleasure and detached concern shaping the tilt of his shoulders. "--unwell."

"I'm fine," Siri lied. He could read Sarasti's disbelief and added, as near to babbling as he could remember being since he was a child, "I already talked to Szpindel about it. He's going to give me something."

Sarasti considered about that for a moment, then nodded, the muscles in his shoulders and arms relaxing one by one. "Good."

Siri swallowed, the memory of fingers running along the back of his neck and up into his hair making him shiver.

"Tell me if you need anything." Sarasti tilted his head to one side, a careful mimicry of human thoughtfulness, and then turned to leave.

Siri stayed where he was, staring at the spot where Sarasti had been, unable to decide if he wanted to follow him or run as quickly as he could in the opposite direction.

\--

Siri's arm throbbed where Szpindel had injected him, a phantom pain that the missing half of his brain told him was imagined, nothing but a bit of impractical biology, useless in the grand scheme of things. The human half of his brain ignored this logic, latched onto that sharp point of pain while he floated, body heavy with manufactured sleep.

His head felt empty as he floated, his dreams a blank, unending darkness around him. The glow of Sarasti's gaze was noticeably absent; or, he thought, still there but hidden, buried beneath a swirl of light and color. He knew, with the certainty of dream logic, that it all started in the place where Szpindel had stuck him, that ghostly pain turned to ripples of almost-color against the darkness, pulsing in time to the throbbing in his arm. He relaxed into it, drifting and watching that slight, shifting change in the place his right arm would be, out in the world where he still had a body.

He felt himself start to unfurl, consciousness stretching out across the blackness surrounding him, tendrils of awareness grasping at that pulsing brightness. The part of his brain that was always aware that these were dreams--human or machine, he could never decide--knew that his physical body had done the same, uncurled itself until he floated with his limbs splayed, fingertips brushing the plasticine edge of his tent when he drifted too close.

The spot of color glowed brighter as he watched it, each pulse sending waves of colors further out through the darkness. Siri stretched out with them, spreading himself thin. The lack of Sarasti's presence made him feel light, almost giddy, and he wondered if he'd wake up to find himself drifting through open space, away from Sarasti and Theseus and anything else that might try to hold him back.

He reached out a hand that he didn't possess, able to feel the heat pulsing against his ghostly palm as he pressed it firmly against the center of that light. There was a moment of profound emptiness and disappointment as he made contact and felt nothing; no pleasure, no happiness, no desperate need. No spark of anything except more of the same emptiness that had always lived inside of him.

He started to pull his hand away, already convincing himself it didn't matter, when he felt a faint pulsing beneath his palm. He pressed his hand back in, watched as the light grew brighter, colors shining out between his fingers. The colors leaked into his skin until he glowed with them, then grew, pushing themselves up until they circled the tips of Siri's fingers and then, with one surging pulse, encased the rest of his hand in a circle of burning cold and pain.

He screamed with a mouth that didn't belong to him and tried to yank himself free, hand curling into a protective fist as he felt that cold eat at fingers that weren't really there. He could feel both halves of his brain trying to yank him out of the dream and into awareness, but the dream held him fast, colors burrowing beneath his skin and winding their way up his arm and into his shoulder like bright veins. They tugged at him and his arm lifted without his permission, slid forward until he was swallowed up to the shoulder in pulsing darkness.

He felt his arm disappear, become nothing. His cheek pressed up against that edge of nothingness, burning with cold where it made contact. He opened his mouth to scream and a swirl of darkness separated itself from the kaleidoscope surrounding him and slid between his lips, filling his mouth and throat with a warm, inky blackness.

He thrashed his legs, tried to scream, but the darkness pressed deeper, forcing his mouth wide; he heard a voice that sounded a lot like his own say with cold finality, "You can't fight what you are, Siri."

He gave one final, weak struggle and then stopped, tried to shut his eyes and let it take him, but his eyelids refused to exist and he was trapped, watching the pulsing colors rippling along the edge of his vision, spilling up through the darkness into his mouth. That strange, familiar sense of want poured into him with it, across his tongue and down his throat. It filled him with an intensity that made him hope the darkness would swallow him up, drag the rest of him into non-existence alongside his arm. The thing in his mouth moved, thrust deeper into his throat and he felt need settle between his legs, burning hot against the cold nothingness surrounding him.

Something--pulsing cold and full of need--wound its way up his leg, twining around his thigh and settling itself over the heat between his legs. He pushed forward, rubbing himself against it, cries coming out as a choked whimper around the dark colors that continued to spill into his mouth.

He could feel his skin start to change, stained with swirls of light and darkness, when he felt the first point of heat against his skin, pressing against a part of an arm that no longer existed. It was feather light at first, tentative, then it gripped him tight, yanked at him until he remembered something other than the burning need and threat of non-existence surrounding him.

Hot breath blew against his ear, followed by a harsh whisper. 

"Don't struggle."

He made an inhuman sound in the back of his throat as the heat moved from his arm to his chest, pressing against his sternum and twisting him until his back pressed against the wall of darkness. His arms lifted--two of them now, whole and complete--rising above his head until the heat pinned them down, holding him in place. Fingers that weren't his own gripped his chin, turned a face that still didn't belong to him this way and that. 

The voice came again, its sharp angles sending a ripple of heat through him, drawing the endless want inside him inward until it settled heavily in his stomach.

"Be still."

He stopped struggling, animal instinct in the back of his brain insisting that he just needed to be still and quiet for long enough that the voice forgot about him. He hung suspended between the cold emptiness at his back and the heat hovering above him and waited to be forgotten.

Too-long fingers moved from his face to his stomach, pressing into the skin and sliding downward. They took that coiled ball of want with them, spreading it downward until he was reminded of the heaviness between his legs. He shifted his hips against it, tried to push himself up against those fingers, but they ignored him and slid lower, settling between his legs.

Fingers and empty heat slid inside of him, spreading him open and forcing a moan out of his now-empty throat. They didn't wait for him to adjust before they started to move, the rough slide in and out of him making him squirm, wrists pulling against the hand still holding them and legs spreading, feet trying to find purchase against the cold flooring beneath them.

He turned his head and the room around him had changed, endless colors replaced by the dimly lit interior of his tent. His body was pressed along the side of it, molded against its curve, cold against the bare skin of his back and thighs where his clothes had been pushed aside. It moved slightly as he watched it, adjusting to his movement, fabric rippling outward as the body above his shifted. He blinked, hips jerking as whatever was inside of him curled, forcing him wide open and making his cock twitch.

"Don't struggle," the voice repeated, closer this time. 

He had the brief thought that something wasn't right about it, that there was a breathiness beneath the command that shouldn't have been there. It died when another finger slid in beside the first, thick and insistent as his body struggled to adjust. He remembered how slender they'd always looked from afar, deceptively fragile; an adaptation to lull their prey.

The sound he made was half-moan, half-scream as he arched his back, trying to pull away in one breath and pressing himself closer with another, his fear and that ball of heat in the pit of his stomach making him want both at the same time. The grip on his wrists tightened and the fingers started to move inside of him, thrusting in and out with the same rough desperation that Siri felt.

He realized that he'd closed his eyes and opened them again, turning his head away from the wall before he could think better of it.

Sarasti's face hovered above his, too close. His glasses were gone but his eyes were closed, lips curled just enough to bare the points of his teeth. Siri stared at them, sharp and white in the dim light, and felt Sarasti's breath against the side of his face. He licked his lips and moaned weakly, fear and want in the sound as he shifted his hips against Sarasti's hand. His fingers were hot and sharp, unforgiving where they moved inside of him, a parody of almost-humanity just like the rest of him. 

Siri spread his legs wide, wrapping one around one of Sarasti's thighs in an effort to urge him closer, get some friction against his aching cock, and wondered if the strange shape of Sarasti's fingers inside him, the way they seemed to bend in places they shouldn't have, was all in his head. Something about the strangeness of it felt right, filled him in ways he hadn't been aware he'd wanted, scratched an itch he'd only just realized was there. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, shuddering as he felt Sarasti's breath against the side of his neck. 

Sarasti hissed, the sound frustrated and predatory, and Siri had a brief moment of fear before he felt teeth brush against his neck, just hard enough to leave phantom points of pain in their wake. Siri waited for them to break the skin, waited for Sarasti to drink down everything he was. Wanted it to happen.

"Please," Siri groaned, voice high and desperate as he turned his head to the side, baring more of his throat. He could feel tears start to leak from the corner of his eyes, leaving hot, messy tracks down the side of his face as he pulled uselessly against the grip that Sarasti still had on his wrists.

Sarasti gave a warning click, a predator sound that made the hair raise on the back of his neck even as he shivered. He felt the teasing brush of teeth above his pulse point and wondered if the others would see the marks on his neck and know how he'd died.

He wondered if any of them would care.

It was a vague thought, detached from the way his body shifted, cock twitching as Sarasti's teeth retreated, replaced by his mouth. Siri groaned, eyes rolling back as Sarasti sucked a bruise into his skin, the pull of that mouth against his still unbroken skin enough to make him come. He closed his eyes, arching against the side of the tent, sobbing with the force of it. Sarasti's fingers kept moving inside of him, fucking him through it, past the point where the pleasure turned back into pain.

"Stop," Siri gasped, voice thick as he tried to pull away.

Sarasti made a sound, disappointed and inhuman, his fingers giving one last sharp thrust before they stilled. There was a moment of quiet, the only sounds Siri's sobs and the slight hitch in Sarasti's breath as he slid his fingers out of Siri, movements careful in a way that Siri couldn't think clearly enough to appreciate. 

Sarasti kept his head turned slightly, the full weight of his uncovered gaze focused on the empty space beside them. He let go of Siri's wrists and pushed off the wall so he drifted away to hang in the air in front of him, still close enough that Siri could have reached out for him if he'd wanted to.

Siri felt the weightlessness take him now that he was no longer pinned and realized that, for the first time in a long time, he felt alone in his own head, somewhere beneath the sudden return of his exhaustion. "What did you do to me?"

"Just enough to help. You'll have to sleep off the rest." 

Sarasti drifted in front of him, the line of his shoulders curious and impatient as he waited to see if Siri would answer him. When he stayed silent, Sarasti turned, kicking off the wall and propelling himself toward the tent's entrance. He slipped out of it without a word, leaving Siri to drift quietly, trying to make sense of what had happened and decide what to do about it.

\--

The next time Siri woke up, the ship was empty.

He went looking for Szpindel first, searched his lab and his tent and the corridors he liked to wander with Michelle. They were all empty, just like the bridge and the galley and the drum, every other member of the crew who wasn't Siri conspicuously absent from every place he thought to check.

He stood in the middle of the empty lab for a long time, staring at dark monitors and empty tabletops, all evidence that anyone had ever used the space carefully filed away. Like they'd never left their coffins in the first place. Like none of this had happened.

He started toward the crypt, knowing he'd find the others waiting for him there, tucked away in sleep, not dreaming. He stopped halfway there, turned down a corridor that looped around the crypt and through the heart of the ship, past the engines and down below where he'd set up his tent. He drifted past the hatch that lead into his tent, past the one that lead to the tent belonging to Bates, down to the end of the available space where he reached for the hatch that lead to Sarasti's tent instead.

Sarasti was waiting for him, seated in mid-air in the middle of tent, his eyes bare as they met Siri's. 

Siri flexed his hand, no hint of a tremor in his fingers as he curled them into a fist. "Where are they?"

"You know that."

"I want to hear it from you."

Sarasti's eyes flickered down, settling briefly on the bruises on Siri's neck. "Sleeping. Theseus repairs herself."

Siri tightened his fist. "Why didn't you put me in there with them?"

"Because it's your decision."

"What, whether to stay awake?" Siri could feel his fingernails digging crescent-shaped wounds into his palm. "With you? Is that what this is about, you want to get me alone?"

"We are alone," Sarasti reminded him. There was no threat to his voice, but Siri still felt himself shiver. "You will decide whether or not you will remember this."

Siri stared at him, palms throbbing in time with the bruise on his neck. "That's an option?"

"If you wish." 

Siri swallowed, all the questions he wanted to ask fighting for his attention. He didn't know which to ask first, so he went with the simplest one first. "Why?"

"You can't do your job if you're afraid."

That startled a laugh out of Siri, soft and humorless and wrong-feeling against his tongue. He uncurled his fingers slowly, the blunt honesty reassuring. "Too late for that."

Sarasti tilted his head, conceding the point.

"How do I know it won't happen again?"

"You don't." Sarasti's gaze slid down Siri's body, a warm, heavy weight against his skin. "This happens because Theseus has more damage than I realize. She believes that I have damage, too. So, she tries to fulfill needs that I don't have."

"To eat."

Sarasti smiled, showing too many teeth. "To fuck."

Siri reached up, fingers brushing the bruised but still unbroken skin on his neck. "You didn't try to stop her."

"I don't realize what she's doing quickly enough." There was regret in the slope of Sarasti's shoulders, fleeting. Yesterday, Siri would have called it false, an act to lull him into submission. Today, he didn't know. 

"And now?"

"I tell her that you are important to this mission. She agrees."

Siri swallowed, rolling the words over in his head. A part of him wanted to argue, to point out that he was the least important member of the crew. The rest of him just wanted to go to sleep and forget all of this. "Okay."

Sarasti stared at him, waiting.

"Okay," Siri repeated, tongue thick against the roof of his mouth. "Make me forget."

\--

The crypt was cold and silent as Siri stripped out of his clothes, back to Sarasti and eyes fixed on his open coffin. "Will the others remember that we were awake?"

"No."

"Will you?

"Yes."

Siri turned just enough to catch a glimpse of Sarasti out of the corner of his eye. "What would you have done if I said I wanted to remember?"

"Do you want to remember?"

"No."

Sarasti let the word hang in the air between them, the only answer he was willing to give.

Siri turned his head until Sarasti disappeared from view and stepped forward, climbing into his coffin and settling himself inside. When sleep found him, it was artificial and empty and completely devoid of dreams.


End file.
